In-flight entertainment technology traditionally includes storage of digital media in on-aircraft servers that is provided to passengers on airplanes through shared (e.g., ceiling-mounted) and/or personal (e.g., seat-back) terminals. Some carriers desire to provide their passengers with online streaming media access (e.g., received from the Internet or another content sources over one or more networks, as opposed to from on-aircraft storage), which can involve maintaining a communications link between the aircraft and media servers over a communications network. Providing higher quality media and larger numbers of options can place increasing demands on the resources of those communications links. For example, some aircraft include a satellite antenna that enables the aircraft to communicate with a satellite communications system while in flight. Because the communications links are typically capacity limited (or only a portion of the capacity is reserved for such in-flight media), it can be generally impractical or undesirable for all aircraft to receive all possible media options at all times.
This can sometimes manifest as a sub-optimal media consumption experience for passengers. For example, some airlines offer either an “on-demand” type of interface (e.g., the passenger selects content or a channel from a listing of options, presses play, and waits for the new media stream to begin), or a “television” type of interface (e.g., passengers can scroll through channel offerings by incrementing or decrementing a channel selector). The media provided by such approaches may be provided by remote sources received over the communications link. In this case, passengers may see appreciable delay when changing channels (“channel zapping”) due to the time it takes to set up new channels on-demand in response to channel requests from passengers, etc. One technique for addressing the channel zapping delay is to transmit all channel options via the communication link throughout the flight (at least during the portion of the flight when media consumption is permitted), regardless of which channels are being watched. However, because of capacity constraints of the communication link, such an approach tends to provide very limited numbers of channels.